When John King hit his sixties, he did what many older people do: he bought a bungalow. But a life of slippers and bowling did not beckon. Instead, he utterly transformed the modest bungalow into a contemporary home, more Grand Designs thanretirement property.

“I bought a two-bedroom bungalow that was very ugly. It looked a bit like a mobile home, but I had a vision that I could do something with it,” says King, who spent two years on the makeover.

Now the home, called Rowan Wood and located at Hawkhurst in Kent, defies all expectations of what a bungalow should be. It has five bedrooms not two, a vast open-plan living area where there were previously small rooms, and an outdoor swimming pool instead of a bland garden. He has a double garage, but to retain the clean lines of the building he has gone underground.

“My architect thought I was mad. He said if I didn’t want to live in an old-style bungalow I should knock down the original, build a couple of houses there and make some real money. But, in principle, single-storey homes are good properties; they are just unimaginatively designed,” explains King, 64, who was a hotelier and civil engineer before turning his hand to property development.

The house has wooden floors, a wood-burning stove, tall glass doors and a shower room. The garden offers a private space, both for the home and a studio built in it for King’s wife, Sharon Seymour, an artist.

“Living on one storey appeals to older people, but this conversion shows it’s possible to combine that with a contemporary design. Now it is reasonable for a family or younger couples to consider living in this type of home, too,” says King, who is selling his creation for £850,000. (Strutt & Parker, 01227 451123; www.struttandparker.com).

According to estate agents, the bungalow has an enduring appeal to retirees. “Well over half our clients are retirees or those nearing retirement. They want to get rid of stairs, downsize from a family house and clear their mortgage for later life. Demand is always outstripping supply,” explains Gary Hudson of The Bungalow Centre, a specialist estate agency in Bournemouth.

Modest two-bedroom bungalows in his area, with one of the country’s largest retired populations, fetch £240,000 in today’s market. One with three bedrooms and a larger plot may nudge towards £300,000. “We’ve had major price reductions in the past couple of years, but bungalows are now near their 2007 values again,” he says.

“Before the downturn there were some younger buyers who’d buy a poor-condition bungalow and improve it, but the reduced capital values down here no longer make it viable. So the bungalow is back to being a typical retirement property,” says Steve Bates who, with his wife, Annie, runs The Bungalow Estate Agency in Torbay, Devon.

A two- or three-bedroom bungalow in Torquay or Paignton, even with a sea view, can be yours for under £250,000.

Little wonder demand is high, yet ironically the bungalow did not start off as a home for the older occupier. Its history is Indian – the Gujarati word bangalo and Hindu bangla were used for single-storey Indian houses in the 18th century. And the first British examples are believed to have appeared in south London in 1860, when the average life expectancy was in the late fifties.

In the first quarter of the 20th century, bungalows appeared across the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and back in their spiritual home of India, before proliferating across Britain after the Second World War.

Although nostalgia lends the Fifties and Sixties British “prefab” bungalow a certain charm, the image of the post-war temporary homes did little to establish them as a serious home. That is, until we all started living longer.

Yet agents say that demand for bungalows, although consistently high, is changing. Baby boomers, who since the Eighties have bought contemporary homes, are now in their sixties and want similarly high-spec bungalows.

This has prompted an experiment at Upper Heyford, the Oxfordshire village which until 1994 housed an RAF and US Air Force base. One relic of the area’s recent military history is a 1,200-acre village site including 260 bungalows, formerly homes for forces personnel. Some of the bungalows, which look well-worn from the outside, are now rented out privately and used for social housing. But two of them have been transformed to show how they could look in the future.

“One had a basic transformation costing £28,000, turning it into a liveable modern home. The other had a remarkable £100,000 makeover which we called 'aspirational’. It has a vaulted ceiling and a mezzanine floor, and it’s the sort of home you’d find at the top end of central London,” says Bradley Knight of Vast Group, a specialist refurbishment company.

“We did it to prove there’s life in the bungalow. We have shown the high-end bungalow to local residents and planning officials – they just fall quiet when they see what we’ve done,” says Knight. This is a far cry from the worries recently expressed by housing experts, that the bungalow was an endangered species.

Labour introduced newbuild policies insisting that at least 30 homes were built on every hectare of developed land. Given the soaring cost of sites, only high-density schemes of three-storey town houses or blocks of flats could achieve that aim – and in any case, plans for lower-density developments were refused by councils aiming to meet housing targets.

As a result, by 2009, scarcely 300 new bungalows were built across Britain. Old ones that came up for sale were often bought by a “basher”, a developer who would knock it down and replace it with a house or flats.

But that planning regime has been swept away and local communities, will, in the future, have powers to vote for or against significant housing schemes.

“This should herald a renaissance for new bungalows. They make less impact on an area than houses, they don’t overlook neighbours, they’re mainly occupied by older people and most locals rather like the look of them. They stand a much better chance than houses or flats of being welcomed by existing communities,” says an enthusiastic Nick Baines, design director of Rippon Homes, which has made a point of including bungalows in their new schemes, despite density targets.

A 10-bungalow estate at Springwood Warren in Nottinghamshire almost sold out within three months. At another site in Mansfield, originally given consent for nine houses, Rippon is changing the spec to allow just six bungalows instead.

“Developers are happy to produce more bungalows because in the current market older buyers who are downsizingare cash-rich, so they don’t have the mortgage constraints of other buyers,” Baines says.

So the bungalow is back, and by public demand. A survey by the Alliance & Leicester shows 29 per cent of people say the bungalow is their ideal home – more than any other property type – while separate research by the Halifax Bank of Scotland shows the bungalow as the “happiest” home to live in for its security, comfort, design and ease of use.

Convinced? Supporters of the single-level lifestyle acknowledge that some people will always prefer the more conventional design of house. But that, as they say, is another storey.

PROS AND CONS OF LIFE ON THE LEVEL

Pros

Easy to live in, especially for those with mobility issues

Often come with large plots, improving privacy

Hold their value better than most other types of property

Rooms are easier to soundproof than floors, so there is less noise from other users

Easily extended either outward or even upward

Cons

Price per square foot is much higher than for a house or flat

Some regard bungalows easier to break into than houses

Bungalow design has been conservative

Snobbery; some houseowners look down on them — in every sense

Hard to buy if a seller is willing to hold out for a “basher” developer’s top-dollar offer